


you tripped into love when you weren't looking

by elliptical



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Adam Parrish Gets Several Hugs, Cuddling & Snuggling, F/M, Fluff, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-13
Updated: 2019-12-13
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:34:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21783775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elliptical/pseuds/elliptical
Summary: Adam trips into love, careens into love, sprawls face-first into love.  He’s not looking for it.  His future fantasies have never contained other people.  They’ve always been himself, safe, and himself, alone, and himself, free.And he can still have all those things.  Love doesn’t rob his dreams.-Four people Adam falls in love with, and the healing potential of their touches.
Relationships: Adam Parrish/Blue Sargent, Noah Czerny/Adam Parrish, Noah Czerny/Richard Gansey III/Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish/Blue Sargent, Richard Gansey III/Adam Parrish, Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 11
Kudos: 156





	you tripped into love when you weren't looking

In the beginning, Gansey holds Adam like Adam will break.

It’s a time when Adam feels breakable, brittle, and he doesn’t want to, so the touch makes him angry. Angrier because his body won’t respond right. Gansey’s arms encircle him, and Adam’s shoulders pull tight, the tendons in his neck knotting like clenched fists. He tells himself to lean in. Instead, the body stands stiff and unresponsive until Gansey releases him, like he’d been a hostage, and he hates it more than anything because he wants Gansey like he's never wanted anything before.

Later, when they peel back the layers of the other, Adam learns that Gansey’s hesitation had nothing to do with Adam himself. It wasn’t about weakness or fragility or Adam’s capacity to shatter. It was Gansey, terrified and sick with longing and desperate not to lose one of the only people who felt like home.

They each teach and learn the other. And then Gansey’s hugs are warm and tight and borderline reverent. Adam wraps his arms around Gansey and feels the beat of his heart through both of their ribcages, and he reassures himself that Gansey is alive, and Gansey reassures himself that Adam is safe. Gansey’s breath is a whisper of mint across Adam’s skin. Gansey’s palms press against Adam’s back, encouraging, and Adam folds against him like a tree bowing in the wind.

-

In some ways, Blue is the first person to show Adam how to be touched.

He doesn’t know, really, how to make touch a good thing. He knows how to roughhouse and mess around and sling an arm around Noah’s shoulders and let Gansey do the same to him, and he knows that he likes physical contact, but he doesn’t know the rest. There’s all these little pieces you’re supposed to learn young, how to process the weight and warmth and care, and those bits of him are so atrophied he’s not sure they ever existed.

So he holds her hand, and presses an arm against her leg, and lays his head in her lap, and her fingers in his hair are the sweetest mercy he’s been given. He feels like a supplicant forgiven by a god, but he couldn’t say what the forgiveness is for.

They learn each other, too, slow but sure. Blue isn’t a goddess, and Adam isn’t a saint. They’re a pair of kids with an ocean of shared experiences connecting separate shores. It’s easy to understand, later, how each has idealized the other; they each want to end their solitude. Blue knows the shape of this dance better than Adam, but they’re figuring out the steps together.

So in the end, it’s this: Blue’s fingertips rubbing tiny circles on the back of his neck to ease the tension out. His head laid in the crook of her shoulder, eyes closed, inhaling the woodsy scent of her. His muscles loosening in slow increments, pain ebbing like she’s drawing out poison. His arm curled loosely around her, legs splayed with hers, the pair of them safe near the roots of her beech tree. Her low hum of contentment, his exhaustion, and a hunger he hadn’t realized existed until it was fed.

It’s a mundane sort of magic.

-

Noah is the first person Adam doesn’t hesitate to touch.

There’s something about him, something Adam would like to put down to more than ghostliness. In his more cynical moments, Adam thinks maybe he just sensed that Noah is beyond hurting - but that’s not true, not really. It’s that Noah is an outcast, like him, and that Noah seems to hang on the fringes, like him, and that Noah always seems hesitant to initiate contact, like him.

Adam doesn’t think it consciously - it’s only obvious in retrospect - but he reaches instinctively for Noah like he wishes his friends would reach for him. Throws an arm around him, walks hip-to-hip while Gansey and Ronan forge ahead, scuffs Noah's hair and keeps him close.

His reward is Noah’s trust and affection and love. On the strongest days, Noah is kinetic and buzzing, less icy than alive. He’s careful with Adam in ways he isn’t with the others, but that doesn’t make Adam’s skin itch like Gansey’s hesitance. It feels like an upheld promise.

On the bad days, when Adam’s withdrawn somewhere deep inside himself, Noah is often there. Sometimes he’s only strong enough to whisper on the breeze. But sometimes he’ll press himself against Adam’s back as Adam sits on the shitty mattress in his shitty church apartment, and his chin is solid enough to jab Adam’s shoulder, and his icy arms encircle Adam’s. Noah’s fingers sometimes tangle through Adam’s, or they curl around his wrist, a thumb gently pressed to his pulse. Like Noah’s trying to remember how it feels to be alive, or to remind Adam.

They feel the same, sometimes. The same tangled roots weave through their souls. The same violence and trauma and misery. The same ache of love and hope and want. They can both disappear when they want to, and staying anchored isn't easy.

Adam sometimes wishes he could give Noah his body, but Noah never asks for anything except Adam’s trust.

-

Ronan’s touch is all fire, sometimes searing, sometimes smoldering, sometimes simply warm. It takes Adam a long time to understand this. Ronan is equal parts dangerous and safe, hungry and filling. Fire can be a shield against the frost or burn too-dry forests to ashes.

Ronan doesn’t hesitate like Gansey, because Ronan has never been afraid his touch will break things. Ronan fears demons that live inside him. He’s fierce and loyal and protective, and he holds Adam like letting go is an agony.

Adam expects to feel constrained, trapped, the animal in his lungs thrashing at the first sign of restraint. But Ronan doesn’t hold him anywhere he doesn’t want to be. His arms are tight and grounding when Adam needs them, equally loose and relaxed when Adam needs that instead. He smells like smoke and hay and gasoline. He plucks Adam’s wound-up strings and creates music.

-

Adam trips into love, careens into love, sprawls face-first into love. He’s not looking for it. His future fantasies have never contained other people. They’ve always been himself, safe, and himself, alone, and himself, free.

And he can still have all those things. Love doesn’t rob his dreams.

He can also have this:

The five of them, a messy tangle of limbs on the ground in the middle of Cabeswater. Roots in his heart, leaves in his head, grass on his skin. Ronan making a study of one hand, pressing his thumb into Adam’s palm in a way that draws a low groan from him. Noah, a cool comfort from the sun, letting Adam lean back against him, his breath tickling the shell of Adam’s ear. Blue, a leg slung over his lap, both her hands on his shoulders, smoothing out the knots. And Gansey, on his other side, his palm pressed against Adam’s heart, eyes closed like he’s trying to memorize the rhythm.

Adam falls in love with them, and he falls in love with being loved, and it’s good, it’s right, it’s okay.

It’s home.

**Author's Note:**

> this is significantly softer than things i usually write. i like the idea of touch being charged for adam, and his relationships with the others feeling physically distinct as well as emotionally. let adam parrish get held while feeling safe and retaining his independence. the dream


End file.
